Friday, June 21, 2013

Murphy Among the Lilliputians

Seasoned members of the U.S. Senate may be forgiven if they
think U.S. Senator Chris Murphy, elected to the Senate only five months ago, is
a bit of an upstart. It is an unwritten rule in that august body that newly
arrived Senators should be seen but not heard until they’ve paid their dues for
a year.

In the past two years, Connecticut lost two Senators of
longstanding, Chris Dodd and Joe Lieberman, who were replaced by Democrats Dick Blumenthal and Chris Murphy, both of whom in the last six months have been
vigorously pressuring their brethren to vote into law a much watered down
version of Connecticut’s recently adopted gun law.

These efforts, so far, have been unavailing.Two months have passed
since Speaker of the U.S. Senate Harry Reid announced that he declined to bring
up for a vote in the Democratic controlled Senate a bill that would require
background checks for gun purchasers.

In response to the horrific mass murder of children and
staff at Sandy Hook Elementary School, Connecticut’s General Assembly quickly
passed a gun bill widely regarded as the most restrictive in the nation, possibly
outflanking Chicago, the murder capital of the Republic.

There is some reason to believe that the final gun bill in
Connecticut was speedily passed -- far in advance of the completion of a
criminal report on the Sandy Hook mass murder and without benefit of a final
public hearing on the measure – so that the Connecticut legislation might be
showcased in Washington D.C. prior to a pending vote on a national gun bill.

If so, the effort failed. Mr. Reid, convinced he could not
marshal sufficient votes in the Senate to pass a bill infinitely less
restrictive than the Connecticut legislation, recently declined to bring the
bill before the Senate for a vote.

Governor Dannel Malloy
-- who said concerning his state’s gun manufacturers as Connecticut’s gun
restriction bill was being forced through the General Assembly’s sausage making
machine, "What this is about is
the ability of the gun industry to sell as many guns to as many people as
possible, even if they're deranged, even if they're mentally ill, even if they
have a criminal record. They don't care” – was of course disappointed
that a much weaker national gun restriction bill had failed to pass muster in
the Democratic controlled U.S. Senate. And Connecticut’s two cloutless U.S.Senators
were sorely frustrated. Both Mr. Blumenthal, now the state’s senior senator,
and Mr. Murphy publically lashed out at the National Rifle Association (NRA) and
their weak-kneed comrades in the Senate whom they understood to be hanging
limply from puppet strings attaching them to NRA campaign contributions.

Either of Connecticut’s now departed U.S. Senators might
have told the two novice senators that such public intimations are no way to
win friends and influence comrades in what some have called the world’s
greatest deliberative body. Are Mr. Blumenthal and Mr. Murphy prepared to argue
that Harry Reid, the Democratic Speaker of the Senate, is a mindless puppet of
the NRA?

Well, are they?

Mr. Murphy in particular moves from rashness to rashness the
way a flitting pollen collecting bee moves briskly from flower to flower. Along
with U.S. Senator Jon Tester, Mr. Murphy – having danced a public jig over the
grave of the U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment – has now proposed to add to
the Constitution an amendment
that would, according to some Constitutional scholars,
“authorize Congress, states, and local governments to, for instance, restrict
what most newspapers publish, restrict what most advocacy groups, such as the
ACLU, the Sierra Club, and the NRA say, restrict what is said and done by most
churches, and seize the property of corporations without just compensation.”

Here is Mr. Murphy’s proposed amendment:

Section 1. We the people who ordain and establish this
Constitution intend the rights protected by this constitution to be the rights
of natural persons.

Section 2. The words people, person, or citizen as used
in this Constitution do not include corporations, limited liability companies
or other corporate entities established by the laws of any State, the United
States, or any foreign state, and such corporate entities are subject to such
regulation as the people, through their elected State and Federal
representatives, deem reasonable and are otherwise consistent with the powers
of Congress and the States under this Constitution.

Section 3. Nothing contained herein shall be construed to
limit the people’s rights of freedom of speech, freedom of the press, free
exercise of religion, freedom of association and all such other rights of the
people, which rights are unalienable

The Murphy amendment is a thoughtless and juvenile reaction
to a Supreme Court holding that the rights and immunities of the U.S.
Constitution should continue to apply to corporate entities. Mr. Murphy’s own
state, one of the 13 original colonies, was founded as a royal chartered
corporation. Constitutional scholar Eugene Volokh, a law professor at UCLA,
noted that “corporate entities,” include most media companies, nonprofit
groups, and religious organizations. “Under the proposed amendment, all these
groups—as well as ordinary businesses—would lose all their constitutional
rights.”

Connecticut’s junior
U.S. Senator appears to be determinedly working his way through the Bill of Rights in an
attempt to purge it of its ancient excrescences. One can almost hear him
ticking off the list: Second Amendment, done; First Amendment, done. For
progressive utopianists unwilling to acknowledge a politics of limits, not even
the rational limits imposed by constitutions, the sky is always the limit.